This Little Fleet

“Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaining as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a da[r]ling project of mine for the last ten years I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life. The party are in excellent health and sperits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and in perfect harmony. I took an early supper this evening and went to bed.”

--the Journal of Captain Meriwether Lewis, April 7, 1805

So begins the adventure into the great unknown of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Scholars have noted that Lewis either recognized the historical significance of what he was about to do, by placing his name alongside those of Columbus and Cook as the greatest of explorers, or wanted to make sure that those who read these journals later would do so. I think history will judge, or has judged, that he was correct. Lewis wrote this entry at a camp some four miles above Fort Mandan, from which they had departed earlier in the day. Surely these are some of the best words ever written in North Dakota.

Also earlier that day Lewis had written a long letter to President Jefferson, which he sent with a small party he dispatched back to St. Louis. The party took with them volumes of notes and journals and letters, and numerous “souvenirs” of the trip to date, including skins, buffalo robes, antlers, horns, seeds, corn, remnants of other critters, numerous scientific notes and drawings, maps—a treasure trove to a President who never set foot west of Virginia, but was starving for information on what was “out there.” An excerpt from Lewis’ letter to Jefferson:

“Our baggage is all embarked on board six small canoes and two perogues . . . we calculate on traveling at the rate of 20 or 25 miles per day as far as the falls of the Missouri. Beyond this point, or the first range of rocky Mountains situated about 100 miles further, any calculation with rispect to our daily progress, can be little more than conjecture . . . We do not calculate on completeing our voyage within the present year, but expect to reach the Pacific Ocean, and return, as far as the head of the Missouri, or perhaps to this place before winter. You may therefore expect me to meet you at Montachello in September 1806.”

We know, of course, that Lewis was a bit optimistic. He did reach the Pacific in 1805, but wintered there. On their return, they reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806, after a journey of 28 months and some 8,000 miles. He arrived back in Washington DC on December 28, just three months later than he expected. Not bad.

The quotes from Lewis’ journals and his letter to Jefferson are from Clay Jenkinson’s masterpiece, “A Vast and Open Plain – The Writings of the Lewis & Clark Expedition in North Dakota, 1804-1806.” The punctuation and spelling (which had my spellchecker screaming at me for an hour today) are as Jenkinson included them, from the journals and the historical research he did in assembling this marvelous work. Thank you, Clay.

Health Care On The Prairie

Well, that was an interesting 11 days. This is the first time I’ve sat at my desk since April 16. Let me tell you a bit about that day. I spent much of the day digging in the dirt in the back yard preparing for our landscaping project. About suppertime I felt a nagging pain in my right ribcage, which I diagnosed as having done just a little more damage to the herniated disk in my back. Took some drugs. Didn’t help. Pain got worse. About 10:30 I ignored the instructions on the bottle and took some more drugs and went to bed. Didn’t help. By 11:30 I felt like I had this knife sticking me in the ribs, and I was scaring the bejesus out of Lillian, so we jumped in the car and went to the ER.

First diagnosis: Pleurisy. Second diagnosis: Kidney stone. Shift change at ER, new ER doctor, said let’s do a CT scan. Third diagnosis at 4 a.m.: pulmonary embolism. Seems a big old blood clot had formed somewhere in one of my legs, shook itself loose and decided to go on a tour of my body. Went running up my leg all the way to my heart, didn’t like it there, kept going and took up residence in my pulmonary artery. Started to break up, sending these shooting pains through my right lung. That was the pain I was feeling in my rib cage.

Now, 11 days later, after two bouts with pneumonia and one small kidney failure, I’m back at Red Oak House. The clots are dissolving. Blood is once more flowing through my pulmonary artery. A few months of good drugs and respiratory and physical therapy I’ll be fine. There was one point at which, I later learned, that I might have been in some trouble. While I was somewhere off in la-la-land Saturday morning, Lillian and her sister Beckie demanded a specialist, who arrived later in the day and corrected my medication. Thanks to those two, and my sister Jill, a former nurse who helped us understand technical stuff, I am here today.

It was a long, boring 11 days. For those of you who called, visited and sent flowers, balloons and letters, Thank You. For those of you who didn’t, Thank You too. To be truthful, with the shortness of breath and the pain, I really didn’t want to talk to anyone for much of that time.

I’m fine. Bismarck’s medical system worked. It is amazingly sophisticated, far, far beyond what I remember from the last time I went through one of these blood clot episodes 12 years ago. So I thought today I would share with you something I wrote a few years ago about health care here on the prairie, which some of you may remember from the first time it appeared in print.

My 83-year-old mother is a resident of Western Horizons Care Center in Hettinger, North Dakota, population 1,307, 14 of them doctors serving a regional medical facility that cares for residents of a 5,000 square mile expanse of prairie at the intersection of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, where the population averages just over one person per square mile.

In her younger days, my mother worked as director of nursing at Western Horizons (then known as Hillcrest, for its location--only coincidentally, I think, on a hill across the highway from the Hettinger cemetery, where many of the residents can look down on the resting place of spouses and other loved ones) while she and my dad struggled to put seven kids through college. Today, she lives there and has most everything she needs, including her large circle of friends and, most importantly, for someone who suffers the normal aches and pains and medical crises of an 83-year-old, her old friend and longtime doctor, Joe Mattson.

I visited with Joe a while back at Hettinger’s hospital, where he had put my mom for a few days because an infection had sent her temperature soaring and he needed to get it under control. Joe’s a generous, kind-hearted country doctor who forsook big city riches in the 1960’s for a chance for he and his wife Pat to raise their children - seven in all, three of their own and four adopted - on the prairie. He and a couple other visionary doctors built this great medical center to bring health care to this sparsely populated area - a clinic, a hospital, a nursing home and an assisted living facility - and provide more than 200 jobs, perhaps a fourth of all the jobs in Hettinger today.

I confess I don’t know him well. He came to Hettinger after I left for college, and our acquaintance is a result of being unable to avoid bumping into each other in a small town on my visits home. I enjoy him immensely, a big bear of a man with a booming voice and unruly hair, and whose slightly rumpled and gruff appearance belies a bedside manner of Mother Theresa.

He visited my mother’s room late on a Friday afternoon, at the end of a long day in an even longer week, appearing untired at a time when most men well into their 60’s would just be looking for a recliner and a little supper. He looked at the charts, puzzled over the temperature and infection, and then plopped down in a chair and struck up a conversation, of grandkids and bad backs and summer vacations and the kind of thing old friends talk about.

More than 15 minutes he sat there, reassuring me, and through me, my mom, that nothing abnormal is going on here in a body that’s just getting a little older and a little harder to manage some days. We’ll just send in some more antibiotics and get this thing fixed.

He talked of his two pre-school grandkids who were staying with him and Pat while a daughter completed a move without them in her hair. He talked about his weekend schedule. He’s a deacon in the Catholic Church in Hettinger, and this coming weekend the priest at Reeder, 13 miles down the road, is on vacation, so Joe was going to run over there and give communion on Sunday. And then he left--a 20 minute hospital room call, and I suspect he had more before he went home to Pat and those grandkids.

Later, approaching dark, the nurse came back in and said Dr. Mattson had just called and thought maybe my mom should take one of these pills before she went to sleep. He’d been thinking about her, even at home hours later, and wanted her to be more comfortable through the night.

Mom slept well indeed, and Saturday morning felt good, so I went home, promising to call. We talked a couple of times Saturday, and again Sunday afternoon when she told me she probably would go home Monday. “Has the doctor been in today?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, and he says my temperature is down and my blood test looks good, and I can go home tomorrow. And guess what? He had just come from Reeder when he stopped to check on me, and he said ‘Phyllis, I bet you didn’t get communion this week, did you?’”

“And he reached into his pocket and pulled out his little box and we said a prayer and he gave me communion.”

Body and soul.

And we wonder why we live in North Dakota?

The Glory of Work and the Joy of Living

Theodore Roosevelt authored more than 30 books, more than any other president, and everyone should read some of them, including TR’s autobiography, from which the paragraphs below are taken. They're at the beginning of Chapter 4, “In Cowboy Land,” in which he recounts his adventures in the Badlands of Dakota Territory in the 1880’s.

THOUGH I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota, beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burned our faces. There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

You can still buy the book, “Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography,” most anywhere. It was published by McMillan in 1913 and is still in print. Bartleby has put it online and you can go here if you just want to read the chapter on his time as a cowboy.

Clay Jenkinson has a very good biographical essay entitled “What Theodore Roosevelt Learned In The American West” at the Theodore Roosevelt Center’s website.

Of course, Roosevelt is the subject of many, many biographies. One of my favorites is “Mornings On Horseback” by David McCullough. McCullough recounts the first meeting between TR and Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney of Dickinson. Stickney treated Roosevelt’s blistered feet after he had just walked 45 miles through the muddy spring gumbo of western North Dakota to deliver three boat thieves to jail in Dickinson.

An excerpt:

“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability, and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”

TR was asked to give the Fourth Of July Speech in Dickinson that year (1886). McCullough prints a part of it, including this:

“It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is he way in which we use it.

“I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we are to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.”

On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he could do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”

Well, it was almost like Roosevelt saw that his ranching days in North Dakota were coming to an end. The following winter of 1886-87 was the fiercest on record in the Northern Plains. Most of the cattle on the open range died. We’ve had bad winters since, even in our lifetime, but in frontier days there were no tractors, front end loaders, bulldozers, and even helicopters, to get feed to starving cattle. So they starved. Roosevelt severely downsized his ranching operations and no longer stayed active in the business. He had lost most of his cattle, and in the end, a sizeable chunk of his inheritance. He continued to visit the Badlands until his death, mostly to hunt or for politics.

A good list of Roosevelt literature can be found at the website of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson.

“Ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.”

Those are indeed some of the best words ever written about North Dakota.

What Exactly Are Those Best Things, Anyway?

Okay, at the suggestion of friends, I think I’ve figured out a way to broaden the focus of “Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota.” I’m going to expand the meaning of some of the words in the title.

Best will include Most Interesting, Most Important, Funniest and Most Inspiring.

Things will include Songs, Books, Speeches, Sermons, Essays, Stories and Poems.

Written will include Said, Sung, Read, Told and Given.

About will include In, To, For, or By North Dakotans (including former North Dakotans, even though I think being a North Dakotan is kind of like being a Catholic—you’re in for life, no matter what you say).

North Dakota will include the Dakota or Dacotah people, from whom we got our name, as well as The Prairie and The Great Plains Areas of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, although I’m going to be careful to not go too far afield, too often.

There are, for example, a lot of good songwriters in North Dakota or from North Dakota. There have been a lot of good speeches given in North Dakota, or about North Dakota. There are a lot of important books all North Dakotans should read. For example, my friend Ardell Tharaldson says every North Dakotan should read two books: “The North Dakota Political Tradition” a series of essays providing a concise political history of North Dakota, edited by Thomas W. Howard, and Bruce Nelson’s “Land of the Dacotahs,” a kind of fractured history containing a lot of really good stories about the Dacotah people and our part of the Great Plains. He’s right, and I’ll provide some excerpts from each of those one of these days.

And so you might find the title “Some Of The Funniest Things Ever Written About North Dakota” over some excerpts from columns by Wayne Lubenow or Tony Bender or Lloyd Omdahl. Or “Some of the Best Songs Ever Sung By North Dakotans” over songs by Chuck Suchy or Bobby Vee. You get the idea.

Tomorrow: Theodore Roosevelt.

Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota

I have a pretty good North Dakota library. I know of at least three or four private North Dakota book collections that are probably bigger or better, but I’ve spent some time and money working on mine, and while I haven’t read every one of my North Dakota books cover to cover, I’ve read at least a little bit of every one. I’ve been reading some I hadn’t finished the past few months and re-reading some favorites (North Dakota winters are good for that), and fretting that most of us North Dakotans don’t know as much about our state as we should. Some really good writers write some really good stuff about our state. So, to encourage you (and me) to read more North Dakota books, I’m going to start a little series here called “Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota.”

In this series, I’m going to grab excerpts, mostly from books, although from time to time I may reprint whole articles and hope the authors don’t sue me. I’ll try to keep them down to five or six hundred words. I’ll tell you a little about the author and give you enough information on book excerpts so that you can find the book yourself. I’m betting most of these will be in a public library somewhere in North Dakota. Start with your own public library. If they don’t have it, they can usually get it on inter-library loan for you.

I buy a lot of my books from abe.com. You can also try alibris.com, and more and more, amazon.com is finding used North Dakota books as well. In Bismarck, the Owl has a nice little North Dakota bookshelf with fairly reasonable prices. Feel free to suggest other sources in comments at the end of this article.

I’m not going to lend you my books. I’ve done that too many times and had to go buy a second copy because I couldn’t remember who I loaned a specific book to and never got it back.

I’ll take nominations from you, if you want to send me pieces of your own favorite writings (or send me books – I have no qualms about accepting books from others – that’s different). If you and I disagree that what you send really is some of the best, then we’ll let Lillian – she of the MLS and 25 years experience as a Librarian – cast the deciding vote. But mostly I’ll trust your judgment.

I’ll just give you a couple of samples today, and then get to work putting together a lineup. And waiting for suggestions from you.

The first excerpt is from “Badlands and Broncho Trails,” published in Bismarck in 1922, a short book by Lewis F. Crawford, former superintendent of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, among other things, and it is his comparison of North Dakota’s Badlands and the mountains. It has a good made-up word in it. I don’t know how he got that by his editors, but I say “Good for him.” It also has a little sexist phrase in it, but never mind that. It was 1922, and probably earned him the title of "gentleman."

Size is only one element of grandeur. Beauty is usually made up of fine lines and rich colorings, and depends largely upon its transitoriness. It defies the camera. Beauty, whether in woman or nature, is never static. The camera always is. Mountains are too vast to get a close up view and too far away to give distinctiveness; they are grand, sublime, majestic, but are static lifeless pictures, unchanging through the ages, everlasting to everlasting. The Badlands are willfully coquettish. Mountains are the cold marble statues with unspeaking lips and unseeing eyes; the Badlands are the living actors with flushed faces, beaming countenances and pulsing blood. The sublimity of the mountains is awe-inspiring and reduces the beholder to nothingness, while that of the Badlands is palpitating, alluring, ecstatic; the one soul subduing, the other soul accruing.

The second is a short poem by Paul Southworth Bliss, from his collection “The Rye is the Sea,” published in Bismarck in 1936, and the last, as far as I can tell, of his 8 volumes of poetry, much of it about North Dakota. The poem was written in Mandan, he says, on a spring day in 1936, a day much like today, and I thought of it as I watched the brief thunderstorm this morning (that was a treat, wasn’t it?). Bliss gives a date and location for each of his poems. I like that.

SOUTHWIND IN APRIL

Southwind in April stirs
Marsh elders in the lane;
Kinghead and cockleburs
Are white in the rain.

Red willows in the river,
Deep-flooded but warm;
Gray cottonwoods a-quiver
In the April storm.

Southwind in April--how
It draws winter’s sting!
Southwind in April, now
I know it is Spring.

--April 26, 1936, Mandan, N.D.

I’ll tell you more about those two authors later, because I like them both a lot, and will share more of their work with you. I hope you like them too.

Dick The Butcher Had It Right

Well, a while back Clay Jenkinson asked in his newspaper column what we could do that would be really, really good for North Dakota if we basically had unlimited amounts of money, because that’s what our oil is going to provide. One expert said our state government budget surplus could go from One Billion Dollars to Six Billion Dollars, and that we should plan to do big things with that kind of money. I’ve read a couple of responses by people I admire, Ken Rogers, editorial page editor for the Bismarck Tribune and Tom Dennis, editorial page editor for the Grand Forks Herald, and both have included Higher Education in their discussions.

They’re on the right track. I’ve discussed this Clay before and I’ll share it with you now.

Here’s the basic premise:

We Make North Dakota the Public Higher Education Center of the Universe.

Here’s how.

First, we serve notice on every North Dakota University/College/Junior College Professor, Assistant Professor, Instructor, Dean, Vice President, President, Middle and Top Level Managers and Professional Staff that their jobs will be ending at some arbitrary date, say 18 or 24 months hence. All of them.

That’s the bad news – for them. Here’s the good news.

We announce that we are going to double, triple, or even quadruple (I haven’t figured out yet how high we should go) every one of the salaries we pay those people, and they are going to be welcome to reapply for their jobs. But they will have to compete for them with everyone else who applies, and if it turns out that North Dakota is paying the highest salaries in Higher Education in America, as word spreads (I don’t think we’d have to worry about that—this will be the biggest news in higher education in many years—maybe ever) we should attract the very best applicants in Higher Education in America – academic, professional, and administrative. Some of the current staff will make the cut. Some won’t.

The ultimate goal here is to have the single best public university system in America—maybe the World. This will work mostly because those we hire will get the chance to live and work in an intellectual community that challenges them to greater heights. And get paid what they are worth.

Meanwhile, during that time between when we announce this, and when we rehire – I’d like to think we could do it in 18-24 months – we set about reinventing our system.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to do this. It might involve closing, reinventing missions, merging, God knows what all. But I bet we could put together a team of the very brightest North Dakotans and expatriates – businessmen, educators, farmers, carpenters, philosophers, coal miners, economists (well, the jury is still, out on economists), doctors, lawyers, journalists and even a politician or two – and they could figure it out. If you throw out all the rules and just start over, you could get past sacred cows like duplication of programs and degrees and other problems identified by Elwyn G. Robinson in his “too-much mistake” theory.

We can specialize, or we can generalize. Our goal can be to turn out the best engineers in the world (but only at one of our universities), or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers, or welders, or whatever we want each element of our university system to specialize in. We could have one great university that only teaches philosophy and the humanities.

So we create this system, and what happens?

Well, I’ll bet the best students in America will come here to learn, because it will be the best place in America to come to learn.

And I’ll bet, in the end, this really won’t cost the state of North Dakota a lot of money. Great Universities and University Systems end up generating lots of money, not costing lots of money. We just need that initial investment—that first billion or two—to begin the process.

After that, I don’t know what happens. I can guess, though, that if we have the best Higher Education system in America, and get the best students in America graduating from it, in the end, as a state, we win. Big time. In the end, many of them will live here, work here, raise families here, start businesses here, invent and manufacture things here, encourage (or demand) development of the arts and humanities here, grow things here, and generally, just help us create the very best place in America to live.

Dick the butcher, in Henry VI, Part II, uttered the famous line “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I like to use that line, not as anything to do with lawyers, but as a euphemism for making radical change. You’ve got to do something radical, something shocking, to get going down the road to quantum change. “Killing” all the professors seems like a good place to start.

I ran this by one of our University Presidents (who's gone now) one night a couple of years ago, after supper and a couple classes of wine. Didn't get much response. Pretty short conversation. I think he blamed it on the wine. What do you think?